At Least 20 Things to Stop Doing as a Leader
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Management Education, Organizational Transformation, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
“We spend a lot of time teaching our leaders what to do. We don’t spend enough time teaching them what to stop.”
Here’s my small contribution on what to “stop doing” immediately. Please add your suggestions to the list.
My Start on the “Leader’s Stop” List (in no particular order):
1. Stop barking orders at people like you’re a drill instructor.
2. Stop expecting people to read your mind.
3. Stop making people feel like taking time off to go on vacation is a sin.
4. Stop multi-tasking when someone asks you a question.
5. Stop handing out only the negative feedback.
6. Stop dressing down people in public.
7. Stop saving all of your feedback for the annual performance review.
8. Stop letting people wander through their days with no context for the organization’s strategic priorities.
9. Stop ignoring people that you don’t like.
10. Stop showing that you don’t like people.
11. Stop reminding everyone that you are the boss.
12. Stop taking credit for the work of others.
13. Stop playing favorites.
14. Stop making everything “all about you.”
15. Stop forgetting to provide people fresh challenges.
16. Stop worrying about what your team members are saying to their co-workers about you. On second thought, maybe you should worry.
17. Stop declaring everything a crisis.
18. Stop blocking our access to people in other groups.
19. Stop managing by fear and intimidation.
20. Stop hoarding information on company and team performance.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Go ahead and add some of your favorite “Stop” suggestions to the list. Not only was it cathartic, it might just be an effective alternative to dispensing a never-ending torrent of advice on what to do. The “Stops” aren’t quite as confusing and they are like a metaphorical kick in the seat of the pants.
If you’re a boss, see the list above and just stop it!
Leadership Caffeine: The Noble Pursuit of Power and Influence
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Life and Business, Management Education, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Note from Art: no ethics or morals were harmed in the making of this post.
Power and influence are not dirty words. Both are components of every organization’s environment and both must be carefully cultivated to succeed as a formal or informal leader.
Power and influence provide the motive power behind organizations and initiatives and the lubrication that keeps the parts and people from binding and grinding and self-destructing.
Nothing happens without the application of power and influence wielded by those that have carefully cultivated these qualities. And while the notion of someone actively pursuing power might seem reprehensible or dirty or immoral to some, I’m not sure why.
Frequently Overheard:
“I don’t want to play the games.”
“I’m sick and tired of politics”
And the always colorful and image evoking, “He must have pictures…”
We’ve all heard those statements and perhaps nodded in agreement. Yet the presence of humans in the working environment guarantees that there will be those that are more effective at connecting, engaging, motivating, and ultimately getting things done through others. And these aren’t necessarily the smartest people or the hardest workers, but they are more than likely the smartest workers.
Intelligence is More than I.Q.
Those that cultivate power and influence work hard on managing themselves. They are emotionally intelligent. These power-pursuers also are innately aware of the impact that they have on others, and they draw upon well-honed skills to manage external perceptions and to adapt to changing situations. They are socially intelligent.
Personal Branding & Building Respectful Relationships:
Those with power and influence have carefully thought through their own personal brand and value proposition, and work hard reinforcing this brand through their actions and behaviors. Their focus is on getting work done through others and asserting their agenda, and to do that, they must forge respectful relationships, build strong social networks and guiding coalitions and they must support others more often than they ask for support.
And my informal observation on those that successfully cultivate organizational power and influence is that they are masters at managing upwards. This is different than sucking up. It’s understanding your boss’s agenda and priorities and helping her succeed, and it’s leveraging those priorities to grow visibility, get involved with key projects and to curry support.
Backroom Dealers and Dirty Politicians Need Not Apply:
While the bad eggs in the corporate world grab the headlines and the cool orange prison garb that’s been so executive fashionable for the past decade, the gross majority of people in organizations do not resemble those characters.
I’ve worked in and around companies with hundreds to hundreds of thousands of employees and while there have been some blog post worthy lousy leaders, they are the exception not the rule.
From top executives to truly powerful individual contributors that serve as influencers on key strategic choices and projects to those leading from the middle, there are great collectors and noble users of powers almost everywhere.
The abusers and the abusive exist and their tactics are reprehensible. I don’t have an easy answer if you are victimized by one of those creatures, other than to indicate that if you improve your cultivation of power and influence, you will be better able to deal with or avoid the situation and person the next time.
6 Reasons Why Pursuing Power and Influence is a Good Career Move:
1. Productivity. Those with power and influence get more done. You can print this and put it on a bumper sticker!
2. It’s honest, hard work. The pursuit of power and influence in an organization involves figuring out how to stand out from the crowd. This is generally best accomplished by some combination of darned hard work, great ideas, building good social networks and helping your boss succeed. Nothing wrong with those pursuits!
3, It’s about supporting your brand authenticity. The act of pursuing power is in large part a personal branding activity. You have to decide what you stand for and you need to communicate and substantiate your value proposition through your actions. Professionals should take responsibility for their personal branding, and the pursuit of power and influence requires that you live up to your stated value proposition. People are generally not naïve and can smell a hollow value proposition and an inauthentic leader a few miles away.
4. You cultivate critical growth skills. Gaining power and influence requires great people skills…great social intelligence. Part of cultivating great people skills involves understanding how you are perceived by those around you, and this means that you must be alert and open to feedback and to making the effort to improve based on the feedback. This growing power and influence stuff is honest, hard work!
5. You create a multiplier effect. As you cultivate power, you have the ability to extend your good across the organization. It’s easy to talk about how you wish things would work. Those with power and influence are able to define how things truly work and extend their vision across teams and entire organizations.
6. You create demand for you. Your senior leaders want to see people with ambition, commitment and an interest in doing more. As long as your approach to growth doesn’t involve stepping on the heads and hands of those that you are scrambling over, we really like aggressive people that are willing to help in the good fight.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The pursuit of power and influence is noble. Given the choice between an individual self-confident enough to cultivate power and one not interested in “playing the game,” I know where I’m going every time. The real “game” is about winning by serving customers and stakeholders and legally beating the snot out of competitors.
What’s your strategy to grow your power?
—
Coming Tuesday: the latest episode of the Management Excellence Book Series, featuring a podcast interview with Jocelyn Davis, co-author of Strategic Speed. Also, in case you missed it, check out the prior episode with Bob Sutton, author of Good Boss, Bad Boss.
Leadership Caffeine-Give Your People Room to Run
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Middle Management, Not-For-Profit Leadership, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management, Values, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Overheard: “If I don’t stay on top of my people, nothing gets done.”
If lousy leadership were a crime, the owner of the quote above might just merit a short stretch of quality alone-time to reflect on the implications of his statement. There are so many things truly wrong with the style of leadership that the statement connotes, that I’m not certain where to start.
I regularly run into examples of leaders operating on the frontlines and even the top-lines that equate leading with policing and oversight. In sessions where I poll on the behaviors of great and lousy leaders, the horror stories of micro-managing bosses and inspector and critic style managers are so plentiful that it’s often difficult to rein in the discussions.
The perception that being boss involves constant policing has not yet been bred out of our culture.
There are certainly core issues that demand oversight. Issues of ethics, legal compliance, and discrimination all merit constant vigilance. And maintaining appropriate operational control is absolutely a leader’s responsibility. However, there’s a line that is crossed when the boss extends intense vigilance to the day-to-day and sometimes minute-to-minute work effort of team members. Move too close to this line or, cross it, and you guarantee a tense working atmosphere, a loss of initiative and a deficit of creativity. What should be a creative and productive experience becomes more like a prison experience.
Gaining compliance is not leading. Any two-bit despot can gain compliance by inducing fear through excessive oversight.
In conversations with individuals describing leaders that they admire, commonly referenced behaviors are they exact opposite of the overbearing and over-the-shoulder manager:
Doesn’t micromanage me
Let’s me do my job
Asks me how she can help
Sets clear expectations and then lets me go
Doesn’t jump all over me when I make a mistake…but rather, he asks me what I learned.
We need more leaders that generate those types of comments from their team members.
11 Reminders that Your Job as a Leader is About Building, Not Guarding:
1. Focus on the working environment! You own the responsibility to create and sustain a positive working environment. You cannot do that by micro-managing.
2. Create the right type of oversight by creating a culture of accountability for the values and norms in that environment.
3. You are a teacher. Teach and train. And then teach some more.
4. You are a coach. Observe and provide timely constructive AND positive feedback. Everyday.
5. Be approachable, but don’t spend all of your own time approaching. Give your team room to run.
6. Create context, not confusion. Clarify and communicate. Create context for key organization strategies and goals.
7. Expectations and accountability drive performance. Set clear and challenging expectations for individual and team performance. This is not micro-managing, it is good management.
8. Remember, you’re there to help, don’t hinder. Knock down obstacles and free your people to run.
9. Defend, don’t distract. Learn to shield team members from distractions. Keep your people free to run, part 2.
10. Stay out of the way. You are a distraction most of the time. See the prior item.
11. Assert only when you need to. Don’t assert often. If you have to assert often, review the prior 11 items.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
We’re all responsible for developing the next generation of leaders. Let’s get this right and help educate and train the micro-managing boss out of existence.
Beware Context Canyon When It Comes to Leading Change
Filed under: Leadership, Leading Change, Management Education, Middle Management, Organizational Transformation, Professional Growth, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
We invest a great deal of time talking and writing and preaching about change. We discuss resistance to change, fear of change, our own need for personal change and the challenges that organizations face when it comes to embracing change.
We’re not very good at changing, but we sure like to talk about it.
Spend a few sleepless nights channel surfing the infomercials (a discomfiting experience in more ways than one), and you’ll realize that there’s a tremendous amount of energy that goes into selling us stuff to help us change in all area of our lives.
In my non-scientific polling and personal leadership anthropological meanderings, I’m comfortable generalizing that most change initiatives fail. From diets and fitness programs to resolutions and new corporate directions, failure to change is epidemic.
While I suspect that our failure to change our own individual habits is a close cousin to change failures in business, I’ll focus on the latter here.
We Create Our Own Context Canyons:
Most managers and management teams spend a great deal of time processing on the drivers of change. By the time they start discussing or announcing changes, the issues and often the approaches are well-baked in their minds, while the rest of us on the receiving end are left with the deep thoughts of, “Huh?” or, “Why?” or, “Huh?”
The result is a gaping hole that I call the “Context Canyon” between managers suggesting change and employees processing on the implications of change. Depending upon the culture, resistance will range from loud and overt to quiet and passively aggressive. Nonetheless, resistance will reign supreme until the “Context Canyon” is filled-in not just by the managers, but also by the rest of the organization taking the time to internalize the case for change.
5 Common-Sense Ideas to Help with Change:
1. Recognize the Context Canyon. You and your peers may have worked through the case for change for months. You’ve had time to process on the rationale and think through and even debate options and alternatives. Mentally, you’ve long since accepted the need to change. Remember that if the first time that your employees hear about the change is when you announce it, they are just starting their mental processing journey. Your springing it on them has put them on the defensive from the beginning.
2. Involve People in Change Discussion Early and Often. People typically want to contribute to the discussions on change. They want to do their part to facilitate changes that will better serve customers and improve value for stakeholders. Treat them as an extended team of advisors. You show remarkable leadership courage and you show your respect for your employees by engaging them up-front on discussions about change.
3. Get the Why? Right! Again, beware the Context Canyon. People might hear your rationale on Why change is required, but that does not mean that they agree with your logic and your case. A pronouncement from on high typically does not equate to agreement or acceptance. Create safe opportunities for individuals and teams to ask questions, offer their thoughts and process on the case for change.
4. Ask for Help on the What? After awhile, the discussions on “Why Change?” need to move towards “What to do?” You’ll gain stronger organizational support by inviting and listening to active input, than you will dictating changes. Additionally, the shift in discussion from “Why?” to “What?” actually serves to strengthen the case for change. Remember, your organization requires the same amount of time that you do to process-on and internalize the case.
5. Address the WIIFM. Don’t fool yourself. People might be expressing concern about the organization, but everyone is thinking about, “What’s In it for Me?” (The less selfish sounding version is: “What does this mean for me in my job?”) This is the 600-pound gorilla on the back of the elephant in the room. The more time that you put into spanning Context Canyon, and the more that you allow your employees to help you “design the way forward,” the easier it is to deal with WIIFM. Your willingness to allow people to define how they have to change puts a great deal of individual and organizational angst to rest.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
While watching the various infomercials and pitch-people offering all manner of goods to improve our lives in the kitchen, the bedroom and the bank account, it occurred to me that we needed an offering to help us successfully navigate changes in our organizations and jobs. For only three installments of $39.95, I’ll help you navigate Context Canyon. And for the first 20 organizations to order, I’ll throw in the knife set.
There are no silver bullets or magic products that promote change. Use good old-fashioned common-sense based on human psychology. Context is King and involvement promotes engagement.
Management Excellence Book Series Kicks Off Featuring Good Boss, Bad Boss
Filed under: Career, Fresh Voices, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Life and Business, Management Education, Management Excellence Book Series, Middle Management, Professional Growth, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management, Values, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
For as long as I can remember, books have played a major role in my life.
I still recall the day my Mom took me to the Hild Library in Chicago for my first library card. And I remember distinctly the scene a few months later, when she engaged in a vigorous discussion with the library staff on my need for an Adult card. I had consumed everything worth consuming in the Children’s section and needed to move on. Mom prevailed, and the rest for me is reading history.
This preoccupation with reading continued through my summers as a child, including one memorable, slow, hot season reading the World Book from A to Z. While it wasn’t Britannica, it was what we had in our apartment in Chicago. And yes, I read more than the cool transparent overlays. I read the complete text. Every entry. It was a little like work, but I was on a mission. As a result, I have a remarkable store of trivial knowledge on everything that happened in the world up until 1973. Beyond that, I’m a bit fuzzy.
Fast forward a few decades, and books are still a major part of my life. I’ve authored one, I’m working on another and I consume content in history, business and science in an unquenchable thirst to learn more. Given this preoccupation with the written word, it’s fitting and about time that I extend my love of books and regard for the hard work of authors to a feature here on the blog. Thus, welcome to the first post and first interview for the Management Excellence Book Series.
About the Management Excellence Book Series:
First, I’m not a book critic, I’m a book lover. You’ll never find a negative review here, because, if I don’t like the book, I won’t write about it or interview the author. It is my intent to offer a resource with this series that extracts and shares insights and introduces you to new or time-tested great ideas.
I intend on using a mix of audio interviews (podcasts) and posts with transcribed interviews to share ideas and learn more from management book authors that have labored long and hard to help us learn and grow. My mission is to search for the pearls of wisdom, the fresh ideas or the classic ideas that help us all make a difference.
While my audio interview skills are clearly in need of practice, there’s no reason not to start. We are living in a period of time rich with the flow of information and ideas, and I’m excited to help all of us gain just a little bit more insight and context from great management thinkers for use in our professional and personal lives.
I look forward to sharing with you via the interviews. Enjoy!
Art Interviews Bob Sutton About Good Boss, Bad Boss
Art Petty Interviews Bob Sutton on Good Boss, Bad Boss [33:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Art Petty Interviews Bob Sutton on Good Boss, Bad Boss [33:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadGood Boss, Bad Boss by Robert I. Sutton, Ph.D.
Just about everyone is familiar with Bob’s prior work, The No A**Hole Rule! Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One that Isn’t. That great read talked about what many of us have been thinking, and even made the “A” word acceptable business meeting and cocktail party discussion fodder (in the context of the book, of course!).
Bob is back with a tremendous new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss-How to Be the Best and Learn from the Worst, available for pre-order from major booksellers now, with a scheduled publication date of September 7th.
His emphasis in his latest work is on describing the good habits of great bosses, and once again, Bob is saying what many of us are thinking or, living through in our working lives. In this era of the seemingly “disposable worker,” and after a decade of corporate scandals and a great number of bosses doing the “perp walk,” Bob focuses squarely on what the best bosses do day-in and day-out. He contrasts the great habits of good bosses with the equivalent lousy habits and approaches of bad bosses, providing anecdotes and vignettes that we can relate to or anguish over. We all know a few of the bad bosses. Let’s hope that our good boss experiences outweigh those others.
I had the great fortune to connect with Bob recently on a phone call/interview, and our scheduled 10-15 minutes turned into 30 minutes of fascinating insights about the book, and about Bob’s work as a professor and consultant. He was a delight to interview and I sincerely believe that you will find his insights and anecdotes as fascinating as I did. Enjoy the interview and enjoy the book!
And finally, this section from the preface of his book sets the tone well:
“The best bosses don’t ride into town, save the day with a bold move or two, declare victory, and then rest on their laurels. There is no final victory. The main reward for success is usually that you get to keep doing a damn hard (but often satisfying) job for a while longer. Despite the horseshit spewed out by too many management gurus, there are no magic bullets, instant cures or easy shortcuts to becoming a great boss. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar. The best bosses succeed because they keep chipping away at a huge pile of dull, interesting, fun, rewarding, trivial, frustrating, and often ridiculous chores. …Devoting relentless attention to doing one good thing after another-however small-is the only path I know to becoming and remaining a great boss.“
Nine chapters of pure boss gold! Thanks, Bob!
Note from Art: Bob supplied me with a pre-release copy of his book for this interview.
My Book
The desktop reference to leadership success whether you are starting out or starting over.
Art Petty
Welcome to Management Excellence where the focus is on building better leaders and creating high performance organizations.Building Better Leaders
Art Petty's Building Better Leaders programs in Leadership, Management and Developing as a Senior Contributor offer powerful and practical guidance for motivated professionals.
All programs available on-site in group format and select programs available in a distance learning PLUS personalized mentoring format.
Visit Building Better Leaders to find a program to help you or your team move forward. And don't forget to subscribe to the Building Better Leaders Leadership Tip of the Day.
Management Excellence Tools
Download the Management Excellence Guide to Effective Trade Show Marketing. What's Your Strategy & Execution (STREX) Quotient? Download and use the survey to help you gauge your organization's Strategy & Execution effectiveness and identify areas for improvement.e-book-Leadership and the Project Manager - Developing the Skills that Fuel High Performance Download the pdf or go to the e-book pages on this site and contribute to the conversation
Blog Subscriptions
Connect With Me On
E-Newsletter Mailing List
Join my e-newsletter mailing list and receive the latest in best-practices content for leadership, sales & marketing and strategy.